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I'm still not convinced that this is a problem
You don't personally need the resources or know-how for most of this (besides operating but even that can be simplified by bad actors) so long as people can sell you or gift you one. Decentralized terrorist groups like 764 already grooms random local depressed nutjob kids to shoot up schools among many other types of crime, imagine what damage coordinated rival nations could deal if these nutjobs could have access to major weaponry.
And if we ban selling or gifting major weapons but not guns, then we have already established there is a distinction and they do not count as "arms" in the same way.
Also, if nukes are a constitutional right then obviously forming associations to develop and build and sell them is also constitutionally protected.
"You can own a gun, provided you can file one out of a block of iron and personally mine the saltpeter for the powder because we ban the sale of guns and anything which might be helpful in making or using them" would go very much against the spirit of 2A.
General Atomics (GA) and Honeywell International (HON) are both publicly traded companies.
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Then this is no longer a legal matter but rather one of foriegn policy.
We make it known that if material furnished by your nation is used in such an attack that attack will be treated as having come from your nation and let the rivals police themselves.
This has multiple flaws.
What does "material furnished" mean? Do all guns and bullets have to be exclusively made from minerals mined and put together in the US or else it counts as a shooting by a foreign power? If the gun is stored in a Russian made holster, is that a Russian attack? If we don't make it extremely strict, then there's lots of inevitable workarounds created to provide the "pieces" of advanced weaponry to be easily constructed and used.
What about proxy groups? Private organizations that go through deniability chains from those nations can furnish weapons for nutjobs. There will be sophisticated plans where building a convincing casus belli will be difficult. They won't be like al-queda taking credit for 9/11.
It doesn't even take rival nations, just sophisticated networks like the aforementioned 764. They spend some of their child porn money on materials and supply it to a crazed member. Gonna be hard to charge most of them. If giving someone a gun as a gift who just totally coincidentally proceeds to use it in crime can't be charged, then the same would apply to a missile or drone or anything else. "Oh we didn't know he would blow up that building with the rockets we provided him for his birthday". They can produce a lot for their own legal deniability, just like they already do. If we can't get them for shootings, why should I expect we can do it for anything else?
I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse.
Material furnished is exactly what it says, if a nation or any other organization gifts or sells that material outside normal channels they are on the hook for how it is used.
I also dont understand your preoccupation with deniability, we're not talking about citizens with consitutional rights, we're talking about sovereign nations. "Drop the act, we know it was you" is a perfectly valid realpolitik response to such behavior.
"Outside normal channels" what does this mean? Can a terror group just host a raffle that NutJob McGee just happens to win for a free missile?
Outside of what the other comment said about framing, it also means "what if we can't really track it well to begin with?". The exact amount, if any, involvement of Saudi Arabia involved in 9/11 is still contended to this day.
21 years after, we still don't seem to know if a single guy Al-Bayoumi had knowledge of the attacks beforehand, and if they were an intelligence agent working for the Saudi government. This of course is despite the initial reports in 2004 concluding there was no connection.
Did they know? Were they involved? I don't know! There's apparently 50% chance that this guy, who may or may not have been an intelligence agent (and if he was may or may not have been doing it under orders from above) might indicate Saudi involvement. Maybe.
And they found circumstancial evidence for it! Just no smoking gun of direct links.
Under your argument where presumably we should respond to vague traces of government involvement despite layers of deniability, should we have gone after Saudi Arabia too or not?
And maybe the FBI does know the answer for sure and just won't tell us plebs, but that's an assumption. Intelligence apparatuses have been known to make plenty of mistakes, either on accident or "on accident". How do we trust them to be this mystical source after multiple decades in the middle east based largely off (in good faith) a huge mistake and (in bad faith) a lie about WMDs.
For all the wringing of hands about 2nd amendment absolutism, things like background checks and prohibitions on the sale of arms to convicted felons have routinely been upheld as constitutional.
As such "normal channels" means exactly what it says. Is this terror group performing the legally mandated background checks and filling out the legally mandated transfer paperwork/bill of sale? If so they will be easy to track, if not straight to jail.
Sounds like a skill issue.
Under my argument this is something that the President and their Cabinet would have to assess for themselves. If the preponderance of evidence had suggested that the government of Saudi Arabia had been behind (or had prior knowledge of) 9/11 and President Bush decided to have the JDAM fairy pay them a visit, who would you be to judge?
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A hostile nation could make a genuine effort to frame another nation, though.
They could, and the nation being framed would be highly motivated to expose any such act.
Motivation might not be enough if it's a big, resourceful country framing a much weaker one - picture China framing some tiny Middle Eastern shithole. Does the latter reliably have the means to expose the plot? Even if they did offer what most people would find credible evidence, wouldn't the US be motivated to buy China's bullshit rather than precipitate a clash of superpowers? I think you'd run a significant risk of scapegoat countries being glassed for no good reason.
We can spin hypotheticals all we want, but if you're a country that has a military industrial complex, I think that it is reasonable to presume that also have a national security/intelligence bureau, inventories of material etc...
"That material couldn't have come from us because all our material is accounted for" is also a perfectly valid realpolitik response.
Can this be abused by someone with sufficient means and motivation? Yes. But this has been the case since time immemorial and it is the reason things like credibility and having an established history are so important.
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